384 BLACKFRIARS

truth of the Gospel, cannot conceivably accept the gracious invitation extended in the Encyclical. Yet we believe that love and truth and unity belong together as one perfect expression of the Divine will, no one of which may be opposed to the other. Love does not need to wait until truth is wholly agrced upon and unity made manifest. As my personal friend, a Jesuit theologian, has said: “Sympathy without knowledge is futile; knowledge without sympathy is sterile”. Or as the great Apostle St Paul wrotc: “Love bears all things, believes all things”+ven such things as our lack of understanding and our deep divisions over worship and dogma. So as Christians, whether Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant, our first duty towards one another is to express the love of Christ which constrains us. And our second duty is to gain knowledge of one another in such common meeting, dialogue and worship as our faith and conscience allow. . . .

‘As preparations continue for the coming General Council we shall watch and study with keen interest. We hope, too, that the circle of Roman Catholics who take friendly interest in the Ecumenical Move- ment will continue to expand with the cncouragcment of Your Holi- ness.’ (Unitas, Summer 1960, pp. 143-4.)

HESKY S r JOHS, O.P .

HEARD AND SEEN

Festivals

HEY have become an essential feature in the summer landscape of T Europc-from Aix to Elsinore, from York to Cork: the programmes promise fresh wonders, and the cultural caravanserai grows larger every year. Perhaps the larger the lesser, if the terms are those of serious achieve- ment. The festival which springs from the genius of a place, whcrc artists work and, once a year, give public voice and vision to their own achicve- mcnt, can hardly fail to please. ‘I’hus Pradcs or ..Udeburgh can claim an authentic purpose which the stream-lined publicity of Edinburgh certainly fails to justify. ‘I’he big battalions of opera and international orchestra command the crowds and the large-scale cash, but it needs more than a reiterated dialect play in a converted Asscmbly Hall (or Gaelic ballads in a church hall after hours) to make the l’dinburgh Festival an organic thing: its affinities, in artistic terms, arc those of the international airport and the Westbury I Iotel. Once the decorations arc down and the troops of the tattoo have gone back to Knightsbridge, art can depart as well: its season is over with the end of summer.

It is a mark of the cultural wilderness in which we live that we should be sustained by such oases. ?’he milling multitudes who have been invading the Tate this summer to scc the stupendous Picasso show have been led there by who knows what motives of curiosity or of kecping up with the telly-alerted Joneses. Has one in a thousand of them ever been to Dulwich

HEARD Ah?) SEEN 385 or to the Courtauld Gallery---always open, always free? It seems that only a public noise, not to say notoriety, can attract, and the crowds in Princes Street or P i d i c o are no proof of a national awakening from cultural sleep. Yet a festival can provide an occasion for a voice to be heard: for Mr Arthur Oldham’s choir a t the Catholic Cathedral at Edinburgh, for instancc, to sing his own admirable Mass or the Scottish polyphonic motets he has unearthed. And even the Sational Eisteddfod of Wales, largest and most lumbering of them all-but it is in Welsh at least, and could happen no- where else- -this year saw a modest recognition of the Church’s interest in the arts with an exhibition of Jonah Jones’s stone carvings in the Catholic pavilion. KO one would want to suggest that Catholics should start festivalizing on

their own account: exhibitions of ‘sacred art’ and concerts of ‘sacrcd music’ have, in this country a t least, a melancholy record of unsuccess. In this, as in every area of the national life, the presence of the Church should he assured indeed- but without patronage, without suggesting that the standards which a religious inspiration achieves should be different in kind or degree from those of all well-made, well-played things. I t was interesting, for instance, that this year’s Ndcburgh Festival should have includrd a formal Disputation on Art and Morality. It was listened to with intelligence and indeed enthusiasm, and it could be supposed to havc illuminated some of the things done during a fortnight of music-making in that modest, honest place.

One would like to believe that Catholics could do more to support festivals that are festivals indeed. ’l‘hey can bring to them, from within as it were, the tremendous resources of the Church’s interest in the past-of music and painting, evidently enough. Hut the Church is not an ancient monument, a consecrated Uffizi Gallcry : even in t h e impoverished cultural circumstances of this country it has musicians and painters and poets who have much to give: the music of Lennox Berkeley, the painting of Grahsm Suthcrland, the stained glass of Patrick Ikyntiens-to name, quite arbitrarily, only three. l’hey are unlikely to be found in the mammoth affairs, but they already mean much where seriousness of purpose and a sense of place and person make a festival a human affair: wherc peoplc come because they want to and not because they think they ought to. And local Catholic com- munities could do more to foster festivals of this sort, not, in a crude apolo- getic sense, to show the papal colours but rather to r e - a f f i the Church’s function as the nourisher of culture as meaning that men are makers, made to the image of the maker of all.

PEREGRINE WALKER